Monday, 26 November 2012

6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America

When it comes
to the birth of America, most of us are working from a stew of elementary school
history lessons, Westerns and vague Thanksgiving mythology. And while it's not
surprising those sources might biff a couple details, what's shocking is how
much less interesting the version we learned was. It turns out our teachers,
Hollywood and whoever we got our Thanksgiving mythology from (Big Turkey?) all
made America's origin story far more boring than it actually was for some very
disturbing reasons. For instance ...

#6.
The Indians Weren't Defeated by White Settlers

The Myth:

Our history
books don't really go into a ton of detail about how the Indians became an
endangered species. Some warring, some smallpox blankets and ... death by
broken heart?

When American
Indians show up in movies made by conscientious white people like Oliver Stone,
they usually lament having their land taken from them. The implication is that
Native Americans died off like a species of tree-burrowing owl that couldn't
hack it once their natural habitat was paved over.

But if we had
to put the whole Cowboys and Indians battle in a Hollywood log line, we'd say
the Indians put up a good fight, but were no match for the white man's superior
technology. As surely as scissors cuts paper and rock smashes scissors, gun
beats arrow. That's just how it works.

This is all the American history you'll ever need to know.

The Truth:

There's a
pretty important detail our movies and textbooks left out of the handoff from
Native Americans to white European settlers: It begins in the immediate
aftermath of a full-blown apocalypse. In the decades between Columbus'
discovery of America and the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock, the most
devastating plague in human history raced up the East Coast of America. Just
two years before the pilgrims started the tape recorder on New England's
written history, the
plague wiped out about 96 percent of the Indians in Massachusetts.

In the years
before the plague turned America into The Stand, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described
it as "densely populated" and so "smoky with Indian
bonfires" that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea.
Using your history books to understand what America was like in the 100 years
after Columbus landed there is like trying to understand what modern day
Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalyptic scenes from I Am Legend.

"They call it 'The city that never sleeps' because the only guy who lives
there is a notoriously sarcastic rapper."

Historians
estimate that before the plague, America's population was anywhere between 20
and 100 million (Europe's at the time was 70 million). The plague would
eventually sweep West, killing at least 90 percent of the native population.
For comparison's sake, the Black Plague killed off between 30 and 60 percent of
Europe's population.

While this all
might seem like some heavy shit to lay on a bunch of second graders, your high
school and college history books weren't exactly in a hurry to tell you the
full story. Which is strange, because many historians believe it is the single
most important event in American history. But it's just more fun to believe
that your ancestors won the land by being the superior culture.

Getty
Yay for apocalypse profiteering!

European
settlers had a hard enough time defeating the Mad Max-style stragglers
of the once huge Native American population, even with superior technology. You
have to assume that the Native Americans at full strength would have made shit
powerfully real for any pale faces trying to settle the country they had
already settled. Of course, we don't really need to assume anything about how real
the American Indians kept it, thanks to the many people who came before the
pilgrims. For instance, if you liked playing cowboys and Indians as a kid, you
should know that you could have been playing vikings and Indians, because that
shit actually happened. But before we get to how they kicked Viking ass, you
probably need to know that ...

#5.
Native Culture Wasn't Primitive

American
Indians lived in balance with mother earth, father moon, brother coyote and
sister ... bear? Does that just sound right because of the Berenstain Bears?
Whichever animal they thought was their sister, the point is, the Indians were
leaving behind a small carbon footprint before elements were wearing shoes. If
the government was taken over by hippies tomorrow, the directionless,
ecologically friendly society they'd institute is about what we picture the Native
Americans as having lived like.

"Our foreign policy can be summed up with one word: peyote."

The Truth:

The Indians
were so good at killing trees that a team of Stanford environmental scientists
think they caused a mini ice age in Europe. When all of the tree-clearing
Indians died in the plague, so many trees grew back that it had a reverse
global warming effect. More carbon dioxide was sucked from the air, the Earth's
atmosphere held on to less heat, and Al Gore cried a single tear of joy.

One of the
best examples of how we got Native Americans all wrong is Cahokia, a massive
Native American city located in modern day East St. Louis. In 1250, it was
bigger than London, and featured a sophisticated society with an urban center, satellite
villages and thatched-roof houses lining the central plazas. While the city was
abandoned by the time white people got to it, the evidence they left behind
suggests a complex economy with trade routes from the Great Lakes all the way
down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Herb Roe
Contrary to what museums told us, the loin cloth was not the most advanced
Native American technology.

And that's not
even mentioning America's version of the Great Pyramid: Monk's Mound. You know
how people treat the very existence of the Great Pyramid in Egypt as one of
history's most confounding mysteries? Well, Cahokia's pyramid dwarfs that one, both
in size and in degree of difficulty. The mound contains more than 2.16
billion pounds of soil, some of which had to be carried from hundreds of miles
away, to make sure the city's giant monument was vividly colored. To put that
in perspective, all 13 million people who live in the state of Illinois today
would have to carry three 50-pound baskets of soil from as far away as Indiana
to construct another one.

"What if we built a middle finger large enough to flip off God?"

So why does
Egypt get millions of dollars of tourism and Time Life documentaries dedicated
to their boring old sand pyramids, while you didn't even know about the giant
blue, red, white, black, gray, brown and orange testament to engineering and
human willpower just outside of St. Louis? Well, because the Egyptians know how
to treat one of the Eight Wonders of the World. America, on the other hand,
appears to be trying to figure out how to turn it into a parking lot.

In the realm
of personal hygiene, the Europeans out-hippied the Indians by a foul smelling
mile. Europeans at the time thought baths attracted the black humors, or some
such bullshit, because they never washed and were amazed by the Indians'
interest in personal cleanliness. The natives, for their part, viewed Europeans
as "just plain smelly" according to first hand records.

The Native
Americans didn't hate Europeans just for the clouds of shit-smelling awfulness
they dragged around behind them. Missionaries met Indians who thought Europeans
were "physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly" and
"possessed little intelligence in comparison to themselves." The
Europeans didn't do much to debunk the comparison in the physical beauty
department. Verrazzano, the sailor who witnessed the densely populated East
Coast, called a native who boarded his ship "as beautiful in stature and
build as I can possibly describe," before presumably adding, "you
know, for a dude." This man-crush wasn't an isolated incident. British
fisherman William Wood described the Indians in New England as "more
amiable to behold, though dressed only in Adam's finery, than ... an English
dandy in the newest fashion." Or, with the bullshit removed, "Better
looking than any of us, and they're not even fucking trying."

Getty
"Oh yeah, this is just my walkin' around paint."

OK, now that
we got that out of the way, we can tell you about the historical slash-fiction
your history teacher forgot to tell you actually
freaking happened.

#4.
Columbus Didn't Discover America: Vikings vs. Indians

The Myth:

America was
discovered in 1492 because Europeans were starting to get curious about the
outside world thanks to the Renaissance and Enlightenment and Europeans of the
time just generally being the first smart people ever. Columbus named the
people who already lived there Indians, presumably because he was being
charmingly self-deprecating.

"I don't know what we'll call the people from actual India. That's the
future's problem."

The Truth:

Here's what we
know. A bunch of vikings set up a successful colony in Greenland that lasted
for 518 years (982-1500). To put that into perspective, the white European
settlement currently known as the United States will need to wait until the
year 2125 to match that longevity. The vikings spent a good portion of that
time sending expeditions down south to try to settle what they called Vineland
-- which historians now believe was the East Coast of North America. Some place
the vikings as far south as modern day North Carolina.

"The South will pillage again!"

After spending
a couple decades sneaking ashore to raid Vineland of its ample wood pulp, the
vikings made a go of settling North America in 1005. After landing there with
livestock, supplies and between 100 and 300 settlers, they set up the first
successful European American colony ... for two years. And then the Native
Americans kicked their ass out of the country, shooting the head viking in the
heart with an arrow.

So to recap,
the vikings discovered America. They were camping off the coast of America, and
had every reason to settle America for about 500 years. Despite being the
biggest badasses in European history, one tangle with the natives was enough to
convince the vikings that settling America wasn't worth the trouble. If you
think the pilgrims would have fared any better than the vikings against an East
Coast chock-full of Native Americans, you either don't know what a viking is or
you're placing entirely too much stock in the strategic importance of having
belt buckles on your shoes.

If the Indians
had been at full strength in 1640, white people might still be sneaking onto
the East Coast to steal wood pulp. That's as far as the vikings got in 500
years, and they were sailing from much closer than Europe and desperately
needed the resources -- the two competing theories for why the viking settlements
on Greenland eventually died out are lack of resources and getting killed by
natives -- and, perhaps most importantly, they were goddamned vikings.

So why did
your history teachers lie? This should have been history teachers' version of
dinosaurs: a mostly unknown period of violent awesomeness they nevertheless
told you about because they knew it would hook every male between the ages of 5
and 12 forever.

Consider this one a freebie, Hollywood.

It turns out
that many of the awesomest stories had to be paved over by the bullshit you
memorized in order to protect your teachers and parents from awkward
conversations. Like the one about how ...

#3.
Everything You Know About Columbus Is a Calculated Lie

The Myth:

Columbus
discovered America thanks to a daring journey across the Atlantic. His crew was
about to throw him overboard when land was spotted. Even after he landed in
America, Columbus didn't realize he'd discovered an entire continent because
maps of America were far less reliable back then. In one of the great tragedies
of history, Columbus went to his grave poor, believing he'd merely discovered
India. Nobody really "got" America's potential until the pilgrims
showed up and successfully settled the country for the first time. Nearly 150
years might seem like a long time between trips, but boats were really slow
back in those days, and they'd just learned that the Atlantic Ocean went that
far.

"Pile into a tiny boat with dozens of filthy people for months on
end" isn't the world's most attractive sales pitch.

The Truth:

First of all,
Columbus wasn't the first to cross the Atlantic. Nor were the vikings. Two Native Americans landed in Holland in 60 B.C. and were
promptly not given a national holiday by anyone. Columbus didn't see the
enormous significance of his ability to cross the Atlantic because it wasn't
especially significant. His voyage wasn't particularly difficult. They enjoyed
smooth sailing, and nobody was threatening to throw him overboard. Despite what
history books tell kids (and the Internet apparently believes), Columbus died wealthy,
and with a pretty good idea of what he'd found -- on his third voyage to
America, he wrote in his journal, "I have come to believe that this is a
mighty continent which was hitherto unknown."

"Unknown" in this context means "inhabited by tens of
millions."

The myths
surrounding him cover up the fact that Columbus was calculating, shrewd and as
hungry for gold as the voice over guy in the Cash4Gold ads. When he couldn't
find enough of the yellow stuff to make his voyage profitable, he focused on enslaving Native Americans for profit. That's
how efficient Columbus was -- he discovered America and invented American
slavery in the same 15-year span.

There were
plenty of unsuccessful, mostly horrible attempts to settle America between
Columbus' discovery and the pilgrims' arrival. We only hear these two
"settling of America" stories because history books and movies aren't
huge fans of what white people got up to between 1492 and 1620 in America --
mostly digging for gold and eating each other.

Getty
When people talk about traditional American values, this is what they mean.

They also show
us white Europeans being unable to easily defeat a native population that
hadn't yet been ravaged by plague. It wasn't coincidence that the pilgrims
settled America two years after New England was emptied of 96 percent of the
Indians who lived there. According to James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, that's generally how the
settling process went: The plague acted as a lead blocker for white European
settlers, clearing the land of all the natives. The Europeans had superior
weapons, but they also had superior guns when they tried to colonize China,
India, Africa and basically every other region on the planet. When you picture
Chinese or Indian or African people today, they're not white because those
lands were already inhabited when the Europeans showed up. And so was America.

American
history goes to almost comical lengths to ignore that fact. For instance, if
your reading comprehension was strong in middle school, you might remember the
lost colony of Roanoke, where the people mysteriously disappeared, leaving
behind only one cryptic clue: the word "Croatan" carved into the town
post. As we've covered before, this is only a mystery if you are the
worst detective ever. Croatan was the name of a nearby island populated by
friendly Native Americans. In the years after the people of Roanoke
"disappeared," genetically impossible Native Americans with gray eyes and
an "astounding" familiarity with distinctly European customs began to
pop up in the tribes that moved between Croatan and Roanoke islands.

"It must be written in a cypher of some sort. Let's just go ahead and call
it alien abduction."

#2.
White Settlers Did Not Carve America Out of the Untamed Wilderness

The Myth:

The pilgrims
were the first in a parade of brave settlers who pushed civilization westward
along the frontier with elbow grease and sheer grizzled-old-man strength.

The Truth:

In written
records from early colonial times, you constantly come across
"settlers" being shocked at how convenient the American wilderness
made things for them. The eastern forests, generally portrayed by great
American writers as a "thick, unbroken snarl of trees" no longer existed by the time the white European settlers
actually showed up. The pilgrims couldn't believe their luck when they
found that American forests just naturally contained "an ecological
kaleidosocope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens and spacious
groves of chestnut, hickory and oak."

Getty
"We have hours of weeding ahead of us, but by the grace of God, we will
persevere."

The puzzlingly
obedient wilderness didn't stop in New England. Frontiersmen who settled what
is today Ohio were psyched to find that the forest there naturally grew in a
way that "resembled English parks." You could drive carriages through
the untamed frontier without burning a single calorie clearing rocks, trees and
shrubbery.

Whether they
honestly believed they'd lucked into the 17th century equivalent of Candyland
or were being willfully ignorant about how the land got so tamed, the truth
about the presettled wilderness didn't make it into the official account. It's
the same reason every extraordinarily lucky CEO of the past 100 years has
written a book about leadership. It's always a better idea to credit hard work
and intelligence than to acknowledge that you just got luckier than any group
of people has ever gotten in the history of the world.

"Holy crap, it's already wired for Wi-Fi!"

Nobody's role
in settling America has been quite as overplayed as the pilgrims'. Despite
famous sermons with titles like "Into the Wilderness," the pilgrims
cherry-picked Plymouth specifically because it was a recently abandoned town.
After sailing up and down the coast of Cape Cod, they chose Plymouth Rock
because of "its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn, and
its useful harbor."

We're always
told that the pilgrims were helped by an Indian named Squanto who spoke
English. How the hell did that happen? Had he taken AP English in high school?
The answer to that question is the greatest story your history teachers didn't
bother to teach you. Squanto was from the town that would become Plymouth, but
between being born there and the pilgrims' arrival, he'd undergone an epic
journey that puts Homer's Odyssey to shame.

And at the end, instead of bangin' his hot wife, he had to teach white people
how to bury dead fish with corn kernels.

Squanto had
been kidnapped from Cape Cod as a child and sold into slavery in Spain. He
escaped like the boy Maximus he was, and spent his better years hoofing it west
until he hit the Atlantic Ocean. Deciding that swimming back to America would
take too much time, he learned enough English to convince someone to let him
hitch a ride to "the New World." When he finally got back home, he
found his town deserted. The plague had swept through two years before, taking
everyone but him with it.

when the
pilgrims showed up, instead of being pissed at the people from the Continent
who had stolen his ability to grow up with his family, he decided that since
nobody else was using it, he might as well show them how to make his town work.

Getty
"And this is the sea. I'd recommend bathing in it, because you people
smell like the inside of my asshole."

This is
especially charitable of him when you realize that, while the pilgrims were
nicer than past settlers, they weren't exactly sensitive to Squanto's plight.
According to a pilgrim journal from the days immediately after they arrived,
they raided Indian graves for "bowls, trays, dishes and things like that.
We took several of the prettiest things to carry away with us, and covered the
body up again." And yet Squanto taught them how to make it through a
winter without turning to cannibalism -- a landmark accomplishment for the
British to that point.

Compare that
to Jamestown, the first successful settlement in American history. You don't
know the name of the ship that landed there because the settlers antagonized
the natives, just like the vikings who came before them. The Native Americans
didn't have to actively kill them. They just sat back and laughed as the English
spent the harvest seasons digging holes for gold. The first Virginians were so
desperate without a Squanto that they went from taking Indian slaves to
offering themselves up as slaves to the Indians in exchange for food. Enough
English managed to survive there to make Jamestown the oldest successful
colonial settlement in America. But it's hard to turn it into a religious
allegory in which white people are the good guys, so we get the pilgrims
instead.

Getty
If this were accurate, the settlers would be shitting in bushes while the
Indians told them which leaves were safe to wipe with.

#1.
How Indians Influenced Modern America

The Myth:

After the
natives helped the pilgrims get through that first winter, all playing nice
disappeared until Dances with Wolves. Even the movies that do portray
white people going native portray it as a shocking exception to the rule.
Otherwise, the only influence the natives seem to have on the New World and the
frontiersmen is giving them moving targets to shoot at, and eventually a plot
outline for Avatar.

Getty
It's pretty much just this and Kevin Costner until Wounded Knee.

The Truth:

The fake
mystery of Roanoke is a pretty good key for understanding the difference
between how white settlers actually felt about American Indians and how hard
your history books had to ignore that reality. Settlers defecting to join
native society was so common that it became a major issue for colonial leaders
-- think the modern immigration debate, except with all the white people
risking their lives to get out of American society. According to Loewen, "Europeans were always trying to
stop the outflow. Hernando De Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women
from defecting to Native societies." Pilgrims were so scared of Indian
influence that they outlawed the wearing of long hair.

Ben
Franklin noted that, "No European who has tasted Savage Life can
afterwards bear to live in our societies." While "always bet on
black" might have been sound financial advice by the time Wesley Snipes
offered it, Ben Franklin knew that for much of American history, it was equally
advisable to bet on red.

Getty
"It's this, or powdered wigs and sexual repression."

Franklin
wasn't pointing this out as a critique of the settlers who defected -- he
believed that Indian societies provided greater opportunities for happiness
than European cultures -- and he wasn't the only Founding Father who thought
settlers could learn a thing or two from them. They didn't dress up like
Indians at the Boston Tea Party ironically. That was common protesting gear
during the American revolutions.

For a hundred
years after the American Revolution, none of this was a secret. Political
cartoonists used Indians to represent the colonial side. Colonial soldiers
dressed up like Indians when fighting the British. Documents from the time
indicate that the design of the U.S. government was at least partially inspired
by native tribal society. Historians think the Iroquois Confederacy had a
direct influence on the U.S. Constitution, and the Senate even passed a resolution acknowledging that
"the confederation of the original thirteen colonies into one republic was
influenced ... by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic
principles which were incorporated into the constitution itself."

If we'd incorporated their fashion sense, C-SPAN would be more interesting.

That wasn't
just Congress trying to get some Indian casino money. The colonists came from
European countries that had spent most of their time as monarchies and much of
their resources fighting religious wars with each other. They initially tried
to set up the colonies exactly like Western Europe -- a series of small,
in-fighting nations stacked on top of each other. The idea of an overarching
confederacy of different independent states was completely foreign to them. Or
it would have been. But as Ben Franklin noted in a letter about the failure to
integrate with one another:

"It
would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable
of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner
as that it has subsisted ages and appears insoluble; and yet that a like union
should be impracticable for 10 or a dozen English colonies."

Join, or die (or plagiarize from the Indians).

In 1987, Cornell
University held a conference on the link between the Iroquois' government
and the U.S. Constitution. It was noted that the Iroquois Great Law of Peace
"includes 'freedom of speech, freedom of religion ... separation of power
in government and checks and balances."

One of the
strangest legacies of America's founding is our national obsession with the
apocalypse. There's a new JJ Abrams show coming this fall called The Revolution about a post-apocalyptic
America, and of course The Hunger Games.
We go to a gift shop in Arizona and see dug-up Indian arrowheads, and never
think "this is the same thing as the stuff laying around in Terminator or The Road or that part in The Road Warrior where the feral kid
finds a music box and doesn't know what it is."

We love the
apocalypse as long as nobody acknowledges the truth: It's not a mythical event.
We live on top of one.

Jack O'Brien is the Editor in
Chief of Cracked.com. You can follow him on Twitter.

When he's not drinking and
rethinking the decisions that led him to this point in his life, Elford is a
regular contributor to the music blog Riffraf and can
be found on Facebook
and Twitter.

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